-PTI Petrol price today hit ?74.40 a litre — the highest level under the BJP-led government, while diesel rates touched a record high of ?65.65, renewing calls for cut in excise duty to ease burden on consumers. State-owned oil firms, which have been since June last year revising auto fuel prices daily, on Sunday raised petrol and diesel rates by 19 paisa per litre each in Delhi, according to a price notification. The...

-The Hindu It has sharply lifted tax buoyancy and ushered many new return filers into the income tax net The argument about whether demonetisation was good or bad for the economy refuses to die down even a year after the event. Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan took potshots at it in a recent speech. While one can endlessly debate, with very little data, on whether the ban on high-value currency notes dealt a...

-The Indian Express To deal with corruption, it is not enough to just get fiscal policies right. It is in our collective long-term interest to nurture individual values. I went to an optometrist last week, who gave me one of those cards to read where the font starts out large and then gets progressively small, to test your reading capacity. In this case what was interesting was the content of the card....

-The Economic Times KOLKATA: Charges for SMS alerts on banking transactions may not squeeze account holders much but can be a reasonable earning for many banks, especially in accounts with meagre monthly transactions though income from SMS alert service goes against the advisory from the sector regulator. While Reserve Bank of India told banks to send SMS alerts for every transaction as means to fight frauds, the regulator also directed banks to...

-The Financial Express An RBI-backed research by KLEMS India shows that the employment in 27 sectors fell by 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively in the years 2014 and 2015. For a long time, there is a contention that India’s impressive growth story has been devoid of a similar expansion in jobs, with the proponents, on the other hand, calling the theory a hoax. In absence of comprehensive jobs data, India’s actual employment story...